In my humble opinion, writers have been at the mercy of a good graphic designer when it comes to advertising ebooks or regular books, zines etc. that they have written.

Why? Because writers aren't normally versed in the software that Graphic Designers use to create these graphics. From what I understand, Designers use Macintosh computers and have access to various graphics programs as a result. Writers use what I term "regular computers" which come with programs such as Word, Powerpoint, Excel and more. It's the Microsoft bunch, if you will.

One day, I was searching in my feeble way a solution for creating a book cover for one of my e-books. I played around with a word document, I tried using clip art but it looked like clip art, you know? Nothing looked clean and appealing to the eye. It all looked like a writer trying to use anything to slap on the front of her e-book! I was totally frustrated with the process and thought to myself, surely there has got to be a better way without having to purchase book templates and the like online. I wanted something free and easy to use.

Then I typed in a search phrase into my favorite search engine and Voila! I saw what appeared to be the answer. I found a writer's message board with writers lamenting over my same issue. I kept reading the board and there it was. I was ready to kick myself in the pants for not thinking of it. Use powerpoint to create a banner or book cover and save it as a jpeg file! The colors were rich and deep and other jpeg files such as a writer's headshot etc. could be placed in the powerpoint doc and there was a place to write text.

I can tell you, that this idea works BEAUTIFULLY. I've used it on several of my e-books and have even used it on the back cover of a book I recently wrote. I self-published through Lulu.com and it looks great! So, here's a step by step process of using the powerpoint software for a book cover.

Open powerpoint and choose your layout slide to be portrait sized (or whatever dimensions you need it to be).

Choose what design you would like as far as colors and add whatever jpeg files or clip art you would like to incorporate. This can be a headshot of yourself if this is a book cover, or if you have pictures that you have taken on your pc, you can implement those as well! Feel free to "play" and see how it looks to you.

When you are completely through and have formatted the size of the slide (portrait or landscape etc.) SAVE THE PPT FILE AS A JPEG FILE.

And there you have it! You can easily post this file on any website to advertise your book/ebook/CD/calendar whatever you have for sale. You might want to save the file first as a ppt file and then save again as a jpeg file so that if you want to make minor changes, you don't have to start all over creating your graphic. All you will need to do to "tweak" your cover is open powerpoint, make your changes into the powerpoint file and resave first as a ppt. file and then again as a jpeg file. What could be easier?

Let me know how this works for you. Good Luck!